


Something To Hold On To

by DancerInTheMoonlight



Category: Glee
Genre: Celebrations, Closets, Drunkenness, Eventual Romance, Falling In Love, Fluff and Angst, Hangover, I Don't Even Know, I Will Go Down With This Ship, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Introspection, Light Angst, M/M, New Year's Eve, New Year's Fluff, New Year's Kiss, New Year's Resolutions, New Years, One Night Stands, One Shot, The Cupboard Under The Stairs (Harry Potter), Trapped In A Closet, Warbler Blaine, Why Did I Write This?, Why is the Rum Gone?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-04
Updated: 2019-01-04
Packaged: 2019-10-03 22:37:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17292713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DancerInTheMoonlight/pseuds/DancerInTheMoonlight
Summary: The discovery slots into Blaine and fills him to the brim, as profoundest of epiphanies usually do.





	Something To Hold On To

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as something. . . and then, as they do, turned completely into something else.  
> Happy New Year, guys! :)

The first time it happened was after some of the most excruciating minutes of his life, of Sebastian singing about how he wanted someone back looking mostly at Blaine.

Blaine couldn’t believe it was happening. He was livid. Not because the Warblers were good – try as he might, Blaine could never really be angry with them – but because _the nerve_ of that boy! That annoying, flippant, self-centered, obnoxiously tall, cocky, smirky—

“I think we have a serious problem,” Santana whispered as they leaned close together to lift Artie’s wheelchair on their way out.

Blaine thought so too. And not with the Warblers.

“You go on, I’ll catch up,” Blaine told her on their way out of the Dalton foyer. Kurt was already somewhere ahead of them, and she gave him a look. “Just go,” Baine said.

“Five minutes, tops, Hobbit,” Santana threw over her shoulder, walking away.

Blaine turned back the way he came from. He didn’t have to go far—there were voices in the alcove next to a walk-in cupboard Blaine had sometimes utilized to take a breather back in his Dalton days. He would shut himself in and sit on the bench, and sometimes grip the edges with his hands. (In McKinley, sometimes he subtly gripped the edges of his seat during glee club.)

Blaine entered the alcove just as one of two boys there brusquely turned the corner in the opposite direction. It was one of the boys he used to hang out with, but Blaine took no real notice, because the boy that was left was the one that mattered.

“Sebastian,” his name was a breath expelled from Blaine’s lungs. The boy turned around. Any leftover surprise was already well hidden behind the curve of his mouth.

“Changed your mind, Killer?”

“I—” there were voices in the distance, students, heading left and right across the halls. Not thinking, Blaine grabbed Sebastian’s hand and turned the corner into the walk-in cupboard. “In here,” he said, dragging Sebastian behind him, followed by a firm click of the door.

They were standing against each other in the dark, among the brooms and buckets and a multitude of crammed whatnots, and Blaine took a moment to listen to the muffled noises outside. He could feel the racing pulse in the wrist he was gripping under his palm and he imagined, if he got closer, he could maybe hear the wild drums trying to break free from Sebastian’s chest as well.

“If I had to pick _the_ one person to drag me back into the closet, it would definitely be you, Blaine Anderson,” Sebastian’s steady drawl broke the moment and Blaine found himself hastily reaching for the light switch. The light burned them both in a way they weren’t ready to acknowledge.

“What are you playing at?” Blaine went straight to the point.

“What do you mean? Everybody’s doing MJ, Blaine. There’s nothing to play,” Sebastian answered simply, however, with just that much innocence that Blaine deemed it too much. He had planned on talking to the Captain, and instead here he was, talking to Sebastian.

“Really. _I want you back_? As if—if—”

“As if what, Killer?” Sebastian’s eyes flicked to Blaine’s lips and, inexplicably, Blaine saw red.

“Don’t _even_ ,” Blaine was too angry to come up with a more eloquent reply. “I have a boyfriend! And _I care_ about him.”

“So I’ve heard,” Sebastian said, looking as if this piece of information drove him into a state of mild physical discomfort. “What can I say, except that it’s a good thing the song wasn’t about you, Blaine. Now _that_ would have been decidedly un-classy,” he gritted out. For reasons unknown, this riled Blaine even more.

They were standing so, so close.

“You can stop crushing my wrist, now,” Sebastian added, and, realizing he’d been gripping Sebastian’s hand like his life depended on it the entire time, Blaine released it.

When he left the cupboard without another word, Sebastian didn’t follow.

*

The second time was when Blaine came to Dalton to claim back their trophy. Well after the entire MJ and slushie incident, as well as the attempted redemption which turned into a fiasco both on and off stage, Blaine was a little bit older, and wiser, too – he liked to think.

His nameless and definition-less relationship with this arrogant and seductive boy he didn’t think he could call a friend anymore (if ever) wasn’t something Blaine allowed himself to dwell upon too much. He didn’t get mad anymore with the thought of Sebastian, and Blaine considered this a major improvement.

Not thinking about Sebastian throughout the new-found drama in his life – or at least trying, because Kurt’s quick assumptions made it really hard _not_ to – and not talking to him for god knows how long definitely didn’t prepare Blaine for Sebastian to be the first familiar face he sees upon setting foot into his old school.

Sebastian is waiting for him at the bottom of the staircase. The completion of Blaine’s descent. _Of course_ it was him.

So Blaine gets kind of… mad. He badly wants to take a breather in that cupboard by the alcove, but he can’t, so he settles for not looking at Sebastian while Sebastian talks _at_ him, some old nonsense about turning over a new leaf. Blaine doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care that they haven’t talked, doesn’t care that his hair is longer and that it looks good (the touchable kind, not the perfectly sculpted up-do kind meant only for the eyes), doesn’t care that something seems off with this whole encounter. He just wants the trophy back.

It isn’t until Sebastian informs him he is no longer in charge that Blaine realizes he’d been expecting the Captain but got Sebastian, instead.

On the other hand, Hunter Clarington with his furry prop and his comfy chair is a sight to behold, and when he’s done re-inventing himself, held both in the tight embrace of a brand new Dalton blazer and under Sebastian’s unwavering gaze, Blaine is taking a quick detour to the cupboard after all, careless of what anyone might think or say.

The Warblers _are_ his dark side, along with his inability to move on from things. The discovery slots into Blaine and fills him to the brim, as profoundest of epiphanies usually do.

So, as he grips the edges of his seat, filled with realizations and enveloped in the cupboard’s overbearing darkness, he wishes someone—anyone—would follow and find him there.   

Not long after, he can hear familiar voices outside his hideout, as they pause right in front of the door. But soon Sebastian is steering Hunter away from the cupboard, and when Blaine finally leaves, they are nowhere in sight.

*

The third time it happens, it takes Blaine by surprise.

Blaine is determined to give the most wonderful, the most beautiful and most perfect proposal anyone could ever hope for. He is prepared for criticism, for people advising him not to go through with it, to wait just a little bit longer, to think things over just that one more time. Because he’s young—they’re young— and there’s time, there’s no pressure, there’s a whole world of opportunities ahead of them. But Blaine knows, he knows _because_ he’s young, that there isn’t time, he knows that this is it, that this is what he’s been looking for. Life is so short and then you’re gone, and he knows, he knows it has to be _now_. Not later, not in a few months, not in a couple of years: now.

It brings him back to Dalton. (Sometimes, it seems all his ways lead back to Dalton. He tries not to think about it too much.)

He is not expecting them to understand, so when Sebastian just agrees right away, and with an actual smile, Blaine acts on pure instinct and hugs him. And holds on.

What surprises him is that he doesn’t feel like letting go. He had expected to be persuading Captain of the Warblers, and instead was hugging Sebastian and being hugged in return.

The said captain excuses himself soon after that, depriving Blaine of a proper goodbye when he and Sam finally take their leave. As they pass the alcove on their way out, Blaine thinks he can hear a muffled sound behind the cupboard door. He doesn’t go in.

*

 _Four!_. . . _Three!_. . . _Two!_. . . _One!_

_Happy New Year!_

Blaine isn’t sure where he is and if the frantic annual calls for a happier future are going on still or if the last night’s party cries are just bouncing off the walls in his head. Maybe it’s a celebratory dream. Only, he feels half-awake and heavy, and neither dreams nor celebrations ever felt heavy.

Why was he here again?

Where was Here, for that matter?

He opened his eyes to the emerging morning light.

Still too subdued to move his body, Blaine moved his mind towards remembering Here. Dalton party. No, not a _Dalton_ party, but with Dalton _people_. Or, ex-Dalton people. He’d fallen asleep. Bed. Bedroom?

His brain finally catching up with the extremities, Blaine decided to move his hand but found it couldn’t be done. It couldn’t be done because his hand was being gripped by another. In fact, his whole arm was covered in what was most likely an _another_ arm.

Baine panicked.

He fell asleep alone, that much he _did_ remember, and remembered clearly. He had gotten fed up with everything and everyone—he had been trying desperately to have a good time, but the expectations were too high, they were always too high, and Blaine actually held no love for big parties, because there were too many unfamiliar faces and some shit always went down: stupid accidents, random fights, building evacuations (hello party sparklers, good-bye parties), food poisoning, either drunken sex or drunken _singing_ , which is worse, not to mention how the countdown always proved to be severely anti-climactic (unless you were already too far gone) and generally disappointing, to be honest, ever since he was sixteen. New Years were supposed to be about letting stuff go— the lousy habits, the bad influences, and the self-inflicted burdens –a cyclic ritual of starting _over_.

_“And yet, no matter what you do, it still turns out to be rubbish.”_

Blaine vaguely remembered a conversation from last night.

_“Why would you want to start the year broke, hungover and mortified to the point where you wish you were actually hungover enough to completely erase the whole thing from your hard drive?”_

Blaine couldn’t have agreed more. People spent too much on these parties. Money, time, energy. You stay up all night with a bunch of drunk people in an outfit you’ll probably never ever wear again for the amount of red, gold and glitter in it, and for what? Blaine had no idea.

And then, apparently feeling too wasted to go home, Blaine had found himself a bed.

Which was now being shared with someone. His 23-year-old self was not at all ready to fall victim to New Year’s post-celebratory awkwardmess! Ness.

He meant awkward _ness_. God, his head hurt. His arm hurt. Nothing else did, so Blaine considered it a good omen. Unless there were drugs that made you not feel a single thing, in which case it was a really bad omen.

Sure, people must have had worse than this, but Blaine knew that his most mortifying New Year by far would turn out to be this, when he got far too drunk and woke up with a random, strange guy next to him in bed—and hold up, how did he even know it was a _guy_? Risking a sideways glance, he confirmed his suspicions.

_“See, that’s why we should stop trying to have a good New Year’s Eve.”_

So they did. Blaine threw back anything he could find. Mostly he had been handed random drinks by Thad, their official host and major party-booster, who took one look at Blaine’s face upon his arrival and decided Blaine needed a pick-me-up, or several, thus taking turns between fluttering between other guests like a tall dark and handsome social butterfly and conjuring a new drink for Blaine the moment he finished his previous one. Wes tried to make him sing some karaoke, but Blaine refused because drunken singing was the worst and the older he got, the less likely he was to yield to such temptation, in fact. Then there was some kind of ridiculous drinking game involved (because some of them had been hit by a wave of teenage nostalgia halfway through the party), and maybe dancing (Nick and Jeff, who were also among the ex-Warblers present at this monstrosity of a New Year’s Eve party, dragged Blaine into the dance floor, where he actually managed to stay for a while)—it all kind of fused together in Blaine’s blurry memory—and then around midnight, when he got tired of the mostly unfamiliar faces and decided he didn’t want to witness the countdown (only to be let down when it ended) or be kissed at midnight at all (let alone by a complete stranger), Blaine stumbled upon a place to hide. It had been an honest-to-god cupboard under the stairs, and boy did that make him giggle, because _yer a wizard, Blaine_ , and he’d never felt more nerdy (or more drunk) in his entire life.

The sounds of the party were muffled inside the cupboard. He had no idea how long he sat there, but at some point the door burst open and the person who tried to walk in tripped on Blaine’s feet in the middle of realizing this wasn’t the bathroom, cursing very creatively and with some strange guttural sounds thrown in the mix. Blaine wanted to complement his cursing and, in fact, did so without hesitation.

“ _Who… Blaine?_ ”

Blaine actually remembered replying _“Blaine’s my name!”_ or something equally ridiculous before he recognized the guy. Oh. _Oh_.

Finally, Blaine really looked.

He recognized the guy. He felt an odd mixture of relief and apprehension with this new development. The hand on his hand wasn’t an unfamiliar one. Experimentally, he let his thumb glide up and down across smooth skin, and the other hand’s grip tightened a fraction in response.

His breath caught. He’ll have to move sooner or later.

They had chatted in the cupboard for a while, after Sebastian assured him he didn’t really need the bathroom, as much as he needed to get away from Hunter and his socializing attempts which ended up morphing into tiresome, if villanesque, lectures no one desired endure still, after all this time. Also, Sebastian had been progressively dreading that Hunter might attempt a kiss at midnight, for old times’ sake, and he despised count-downs, in addition to that.

Both Sebastian and Hunter arrived late to the party and Blaine hadn’t run into either of them before he found his cupboard. He wondered if he would have avoided Sebastian, if he had seen him before Sebastian barged into his little hideout and they both agreed one should stop trying to have a good New Year because it was, overall, a horrible and exhausting holiday.

Blaine suddenly remembered how they got here. Blaine had kissed him.

Not at midnight, no.

He remembered the muffled count-down, followed by distant screams of _Happy New Year!_ , and Sebastian uttering something not quite intelligible, half of which to Blaine sounded suspiciously like _bow-nanny_ (and then Blaine couldn’t stop giggling to save his life) as they waited for the overall excitement to pass. They emerged sometime after midnight, when they finally decided the coast was clear enough. They were just standing there in the hallway, alone, after an hour or so of talking in the privacy of their little cupboard, and Blaine totally moved in and kissed him. Blaine had also been half-dead on his feet at this point, though, and Sebastian actually found him a bed, tucked him in and then _ditched_ him. There may have been some promises of his return, but Blaine never stayed awake long enough to witness that. He fell asleep on his own.

But he didn’t wake up on his own, so that meant Sebastian must have ditched him to then go and ditch Hunter. Huh.

Again he looked to his right, and was met with a pair of eyes watching him closely. They held such clarity in the morning light, despite Sebastian’s visibly disheveled appearance.

“What did you say to me back there in the closet?” Blaine voiced the first thing on his mind. Sebastian just blinked at him. It was a very slow blink. “You know. After the count down, while we waited. Bow…nanny and…” Sebastian’s expression turned amused. Blaine frowned. “What?”

“ _Bonne année et bonne santé_ ,” Sebastian repeated, slowly, his voice a little rough and croaky. “I said happy New Year.”

“Oh.”

Bright sunlight filled every corner, and despite the hangover pain, Blaine took it all in: the strange room, their wrinkled clothes, the green of Sebastian’s eyes and the utterly tousled state of his hair. Their interwoven hands.

He felt it then, the ritual of starting over. Holding on by letting go. A new beginning.

“Happy New Year, Sebastian.”

 


End file.
